🎬 #210 How To End a War.
I started this series many years ago, but after one episode I moved onto something else. Not because it wasn’t great but perhaps because I wasn’t properly engaged with it. But on the recommendation of my good friend Pete - I jumped back in this week. An excellently written and directed 5 part mini-series that puts us right in the messed up footsteps of Bravo company of marines on the ground during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Please enjoy
Bry
SHOW: Generation Kill
2008 Creator David Simon
5 episodes, approx 68 mins each
The first thing you’ll notice about the show is its unique rhythm. Maybe because I’m conditioned to expect ‘war on film’ to feel a certain way - amped up and dramatic -this pace felt oddly disturbing in the best possible way [similar to Garland and Mendoza’s Warfare]. Because, instead of slow-mo heroics, here we have normal-ish dudes chatting while distant bombs are levelling a city. Even the camera work is unadorned. It’s practical, just like the mission at hand. And a lot of the time the lens is just soaking up this machine-gun barrage of killer dialogue, spouting from a group of men from all creeds and backgrounds, barely held together by officers who seemingly have their heads a bit more screwed on. Though as things progress, we quickly realise that there doesn’t really seem to be a plan. Maybe an illusionary one, always in the distance through the dust and static of radio chatter.
All the human foibles are at play - guys doing things to please their higher-ups, and those commanding officers doing things to impress their higher-ups, and so on. It’s a fiasco - a failure of the chain of any kind of command.
Based on the book by Evan Wright, this feels close to how I imagine a modern war like that must have felt. Guys itching to see action, but then nothing much really happens. Until suddenly it does. But then, at the end of it all, they question everything - the why of it all. It’s honest - brutally so, probably - and the military doesn’t come off particularly well. It’s dark-hilarious-a messed-up scenario navigated by messed-up characters. But it’s in that messed-up-ness and messiness that humanity springs to life. A lot of the time, it could be a play - scenes staged in their own little environments before the next set change, be it a moving Humvee or a bombed-out building. That’s a big compliment to the entire team: the excellent direction of Susanna White, who helmed most of the episodes, and to the writing team led by Simon and Ed Burns. Not a second of the show is anything but compelling. Seek it out and you shall see - you can’t turn away from it, at least not till the very end.